eMini S&P500 – State of Play – February 2019

Published on: February 07, 2019

The crazy volatility we saw at the end of 2018 in the US Index Futures appears to be behind us. The China Trade War drums aren’t beating so hard and we’ve become (almost) immune to the daily ups and downs of Brexit news.

As such, I think it’s time to consider a reversion back to the regular approach to trading the S&P. There are a few twists as we’ll see below. First of all, the big picture.

It’s quite clear the volume and daily range has dropped, we aren’t seeing so many massive range days. From a liquidity perspective, we are back in the hundreds. It’s still a bit lighter than we’d like but it’s no longer sweeping 8 ticks in an instant. So we don’t need to be in ‘instant decision’ mode any more. There’s time to make decisions. S&P is now less volatile than Crude again!

News is still coming in and hitting the market. Yesterday morning was a good example with the EU commenting that re-negotiations on Brexit were impossible. The knee-jerk reaction from the markets was both silly and predictable. Silly because this wasn’t really news, it’s pantomime. “Oh yes they will, oh no they won’t”. It’s opportunism – it’s not so much the market reacting and re-positioning for a new reality, it’s traders selling in expectation of a larger sell off. Yesterdays move was not only short lived, it stopped just the other side of the range (volume-wise) and completely ran out of steam. It provided a fairly safe and easy to read opportunity for those wanting to trade the bounce back.

• Momentum died out – sellers disappeared
• All three indices started moving sideways
• Eventually, they all started to pop at the same time & that was the entry

Imagine you’d been a seller on the way down, you’d participated in the massive volume traded on the way and you were still short. Then the market stops moving for a few minutes (worry), then it starts back ticking against you (worry a bit more)… What will you do? Stay in? Get out? Well, a lot of them got out and that’s when we saw our counter move. The fact that overall volatility is much lower than December/early January is what gives us an easier trade in this scenario. The market is less likely to sweep against us, we have time to make a decision and risk:reward is on our side. We don’t have to be right all the time but the upside of a bounce against all those sellers is much larger than the stop we need in case it continues down.

I’m suggesting that we revert to older S&P techniques but with a twist. We do still have too be wary of the wild moves. Liquidity isn’t back where it was and the market is still in “knee-jerk” mode. It is feasible that we have liquidity pulled again on strong news. The characteristics of the wilder moves are that we see a big move in one direction BUT they are difficult to join without a lot of risk. On a move down, we can easily see a 10 tick counter move in a few seconds. So unless you want to suffer ‘death of a thousand stops’, you have to get in and sit through a decent move against you. For me, I stopped doing pre-market prep for these markets late last year as it had become irrelevant. The market was in reactive mode with no real rhyme or reason behind the moves. I made one other change at the time:

What we have here is my “alternate workspace” for trading indices. Going from left to right (just the DOM/Depth & Sales) we have DAX/Mini Dax, then EuroStoxx 50 (FESX), Bund (FGBL) and finally the eMini S&P500 on the right. It might look complex at first glance but here is the “why”.

• DAX, Mini Dax, Bund – simply there for correlations and to get an overall feel of volatility,
• eMini S&P, EuroStoxx- when we get the extreme moves in the eMini, with all the sweeps back and forth – the Stoxx tends to put in a one way move.

I put this workspace on a new monitor and I left it there until we had one of those wild moves. As long as Dax and Bund were lively, I took a position in Stoxx in the direction of the move on the S&P. The move on STOXX was much smaller but so were the counter moves. You didn’t have to take the same kind of risk.. For sure, you didn’t get the ‘hero days’ but considering the amount of traders that got wiped out in the past few months, you can keep them.

For now, I’m reverting back to my old ‘style’ and prep for the S&P500. I’m keeping this setup going on the extra monitor so I can switch modes if we see another wild day. I think it’s also worth keeping the Eurex markets up for another couple of reasons.

• They are now open almost 24 hours. It’s not taken off so much in the Asian session yet but it definitely seems more lively in the US session.
• On some days, we have good volatility and it’s simply a better market to trade in the US session.
• Eurex are pushing to get more traders onto the market. If they are successful, we should see an increase in volumes as that continues.

Overall, the S&P seems to be much better behaved with much more volume per price as we move up and down. It’s become a safe play once again but we can still expect volatility to peak as Brexit throws us curve-balls. If the S&P gets too hot, then Eurex is a safer bet.

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Order Flow itself is simply information. Just like charts, it can be used in a number of ways, some good and some bad. But let's first break down order flow into it's components so we all agree what we are talking about:

Order Executions/Tape Reading - This aspect is the real flow of orders. It's the information we see in Time & Sales, Footprint Charts, Cumulative Delta. It is looking at market orders, either as they execute or historically. I guess this is the "true order flow". Every trade is a buy and a sell. We look at market orders because we consider them to be more aggressive. When someone trades with a market orders, they are giving up a price to get an instant fill. Limit orders on the other hand just lazily sit there waiting for a market order to hit them. Often these are market makers with no directional conviction. So we see market orders as being more significant.

But we don't use these in isolation.

Volume Profile/Positions - The tape reading part helps us assess various things like momentum, traders getting stuck, balance of trade BUT the volume profile helps us understand where people are positioned and likely to get stopped out. I sometimes call this "Order Flew". It's important to know when trades will be "washed out" - for example - if we have a volume cluster on the S&P500 Futures and the market moves up 100 points and back down to it, it's unlikely short term traders on either side that were positioned there will still be there. But recent, nearby volume helps us assess areas of positions.

Market Depth - The bids and offers, the lazy passive orders waiting to be hit. This is part of the story but in terms of overall importance, I'd put it at around 20% at most. For example - if you return to the high of the day on any market, the offers will be quite large directly above the high. It means nothing at all. It's just a quirk of the market. It does not help you tell if a price will hold. On the other hand, if you see large depth and as we approach it, we see more added to the depth in front of that price, it means others are front running that depth and that is a useful bit of information.

This is the key - it is all just information. Just like price charts are information. When people look at Order Flow, they consider it to be a technique more than a set of information. They look for things like iceberg orders and decide to make a one rule trading system to fade every iceberg, For these people - yes, order flow trading is overrated because they are trying to ignore everything else going on in the markets and construct a trading system a chimp could execute.

For those looking to improve a decent trading approach, the best thing to focus on in Order Flow is momentum. Once you can read momentum you can:

• Avoid getting into positions when momentum is against you.
• Confirm trades are working after entry when momentum goes your way.
• Exit trades in profit when momentum fades.

That's perhaps the easiest way to use order flow because momentum is easier to read. It's about the market continuing to do what it's already doing. On the other hand, reading a turn in the market with order flow takes a higher level of skill and a little longer to learn.

Order flow can't put lipstick on a pig. It won't help you 'improve' something that doesn't work anyway, which is why whenever someone calls me, the first thing I ask is what they are currently doing and we discuss whether they need a reset or whether it will actually help.

When Jigsaw started back in 2011 - we were one of the first in the space and certainly had the best education. It was always going to attract the underbelly of the trading education/tools world and now we see stuff out there that is so complex but so impressive and futuristic that new traders are drawn to it like moths to a flame.

So here's my advice when looking at Order Flow

• Order Flow can't improve something that doesn't work.
• Order Flow can be used on it's own, without charts to enter and exit the market but you also have to be able to recognize different market states that need different/altered setups. There is nothing magical about this.
• Don't start jumping at shadows and take 50 trades an hour in your first week looking at Order Flow, be selective. It can be exciting to see cause and effect play out in front of you for the first time but don't overtrade.
• Do drills to learn how to read it before you trade it.
• Markets can only go up and down. Don't overcomplicate it. If you have too many Order Flow tools on your screen - you will not be able to make consistent decisions. Less is more.
• Take time to choose a market with a pace you like. Interest rates might send you to sleep, the DAX might give you a heart attack.

It is hard to see how a set of information could be overrated. It is true that some methods of presenting this information are better than others. It is also true that some people simply get on better with different tools (e.g. Footprint vs DOM).

There's a middle ground between complexity and simplicity that will leave you making consistent decisions where you improve over time. For those people, Order Flow will be way underrated because they will be the one's getting the most out of it.

Those that jump in with both feet on day one and those that have 100 different tools up, for those, it's a painful experience.

Keep it simple and manageable. Start with momentum reading and build from there. You will never look back.